Miles Cameron: The Red Knight

Hi

The Red Knight is the first book of five in the Traitor Son Cycle.
You can find all Miles Cameron reviews here.
My copy has 768 pages and I got it from The Book Depository.

“This is a world dominated by The Wild.
Man lives in pockets of civilisation claimed from The Wild. Within men's walls life is civilised, the peace punctuated by tournaments, politicking, courtly love and canny business. Beyond those walls men are prey - vulnerable to the exceptionally powerful and dangerous creatures which populate the land and even more vulnerable to those creatures schemes.
So when one of those creatures breaks out of The Wild and begins preying on people in their homes, it takes a specialist to hunt it down or drive it out...and even then, it's a long, difficult and extremely dangerous job.
The Black Captain and his men are one such group of specialists. They have no idea what they're about to face...
Forget George and the Dragon. Forget Sir Lancelot and tales of Knightly exploits. This is dirty, bloody work. This is violent, visceral action. This is a mercenary knight as you've never seen one before.”

The book is very overwhelming at first; the story is complicated, it has many layers and long chapters.
That’s why it took me at least 150 pages to really get into it and to have an idea of who’s who and what’s going on. But it is so interesting that I kept reading anyway.

The characters are wonderfully done. They struggle with their own views and thoughts because they aren’t simply good or bad. Not one character was boring and I could understand them all very well.
I liked the multiple POV’s a lot. As the story progresses, we get to know them better and we understand where they’re coming from and why they act the way they do. I like getting to know characters this way; slow and gradual. Almost like real friends because friends generally don’t give you a giant info-dump either.

Cameron has put a lot of work into the details and technicalities to make the story more realistic.
We learn about the world and the monsters as we’re walking through it, almost as if we’re discovering it with the characters. The worldbuilding is simply amazing.
The magic system is very interesting and quite different from other Fantasy I’ve read before.
There are amazing plot twists and revelations, especially near the end.
The writing is straightforward, solid, clear, gritty and brutal at times. I loved his style.

The battlescenes are works of art. I love a writer who is able to make us care for both sides even when it’s obvious who we should be rooting for. The endless battle scenes got to be a bit tiring by the end though. The final chapters are battle after battle and there are only so many ways you can describe a war. The detailed descriptions still made them worth the read.
But the book focuses on the little man as well and I loved that aspect. Seeing how this battle affected others in a good or a bad way. It felt so real reading these POV’s because it suddenly isn’t solely about soldiers and war; there’s more to the story, more to the world.

Great book! I’ll be ordering the second part very soon.

5 STARS

Happy reading!
Helena